In March 2020, I opened the Slack workspace I'd been quietly volunteering in for months and watched the channels get loud in a different way. People who used to chat about meetups they'd attended in Bangalore or San Francisco were suddenly asking how anyone was doing. Whether their company was going remote. Whether their visa was OK. Whether they should still apply for that job.
That was the week the world stopped expecting us to gather in person, and the moment I realized I had a choice to make. I'd been mostly a lurker in the community up to that point. A senior engineer at a large company by day, dipping into Women Who Code on weekends, mentoring people one-off, applauding posts I liked. Comfortable. Quiet.
Two months later I applied to be a Leadership Fellow.
For the next year I led the Python and Cloud technical tracks for a community of 2,000+ engineers. I had no idea what I was doing. I'd never run a multi-track virtual event. I'd never moderated a Zoom of 300 people. I'd never had to write a code of conduct, or have the conversation with someone who broke it.
Women Who Code's framing for that year was a line I kept on a sticky note: "Being a Connecting Force when the world is being asked to isolate." That sentence is the entire job. Everything else I learned was downstream of taking it seriously.
What I learned about leading people
Your face is the first thing the team sees. I'm going to start with the embarrassing one. I noticed within the first month that on weeks when I felt anxious about an upcoming event, the team felt anxious too. On weeks when I came into the kickoff Zoom smiling, the team brought their A game. I don't think I'm special. I think the leader's emotional state propagates through a remote team about three times faster than it would in a room with windows. So I started saving the biggest smile for the team. Even when I was tired. Especially when I was tired. It's a small thing. It moved a lot.
Praise has to be louder than complaint. Women Who Code has a practice called #ApplaudHer. It's exactly what it sounds like. You publicly applaud another member or volunteer for something they did. I was skeptical at first. It looked corporate. Then I watched it actually work. Someone would post an #ApplaudHer about a volunteer who'd run a great workshop, and within a day three other people would post their own. The ripple was real.
Communities don't get strong on the back of feedback alone. They get strong on the back of public, specific, frequent applause.
You need anonymous feedback to know what's actually broken. Public applause is half the system. The other half is anonymous feedback forms. People will not tell you the hard things in a direct message. They will tell you in a form, especially if you ask the right question, which is usually some version of "what's something you'd change that you haven't said out loud." I learned more about what was actually broken in our track from those forms than from any 1-on-1 I had that year.
What I learned about running things online
Most of the operational lessons are small and they all compound. The ones that mattered most:
Async by default. Our volunteers were spread across maybe 14 time zones. Live meetings were a luxury. The vast majority of work happened on Slack threads and in Trello boards. The trick is being explicit: Trello is for tasks, Slack is for conversations, Zoom is for kickoffs and retros. When everything happens in one tool, nothing gets followed up on.
GIFs are a feature, not a joke. A volunteer team that can only communicate through text gets emotionally flat fast. A well-placed reaction GIF reminds people there are humans on the other end of these channels. I am not even kidding. Don't be too proud to use them.
Check in personally every few months. People volunteer for communities to grow, their network, their resume, their public speaking, their writing. Not all of those things happen automatically. A 20-minute check-in every quarter where you ask "what do you want to be doing in the community three months from now that you aren't doing now" is the highest-leverage thing a community lead can do for retention.
Automate the repeatable stuff. Slackbot reminders for events. Email templates for the questions you're getting for the fifth time this month. Zoom's auto-confirmation emails set up to include the YouTube playlist link, because you'll be asked for that link after every single event for the rest of time. The hour you spend automating saves twenty hours of email triage over the next quarter. We're all engineers. Treat your community workflow like a system.
Would I recommend it?
Yes. Without hesitation.
I went into the Fellowship as an engineer who liked technical work and wasn't at all sure I cared about community long-term. I came out caring deeply about women in tech and about what it actually takes to build the conditions where people stay in this field instead of quietly leaving.
The Fellowship didn't make me a better engineer. It made me a better operator and, I think, a better person to work with. I learned to run things at scale. I learned to give and receive direct feedback. I learned to spot when a team was about to burn out two weeks before it happened. None of that was on my LinkedIn before. All of it has been load-bearing in every role I've taken since.
If you're an engineer who's curious about leading and you don't know where to start, this is one of the very best on-ramps. You don't need permission. You need to apply.
How the Fellowship actually works
Quick FAQ since people ask me this a lot.
What is the Fellowship? A 1-year program where you lead a technical track at Women Who Code while learning leadership skills (presence, inclusivity, structured feedback) alongside other Fellows.
What do you actually do? You lead a team of volunteers running technical events for a 2k+ member community across the year. The global team helps you build leadership skills as you go.
How do you apply? Sign up as a member of Women Who Code. The Fellowship application gets shared on their newsletter and socials.
What's the process? When I applied in 2020, it was four steps. A written application with descriptive prompts about past experience. A technical materials submission in the Women Who Code template. An interview with the Leadership Directors. A final 1-on-1 with Joey Rosenberg, who was the CEO at the time.
If you're thinking about applying and want to talk it through, please reach out. I always make time for those conversations.